Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been four years since The Motivation Hacker came out, so here's another updated graph of ebook sales by platform including the second year. (See also Second Year Book Sales, First Year Book Sales, Aftermath: The Motivation Hacker)

I forgot about checking the numbers for year three, and now it's been just over four years, so I thought I'd take another look. Looks like sales have more or less held steady on Kindle and the other ebook platforms, but CreateSpace paperbacks have come out of nowhere, so year four was better than year three or even two. Cool! (CreateSpace paperbacks cost more than ebooks, $7.99 to $2.99, but I set it so that the royalty is the same either way, about $2.21.)

Ratings kept falling on Amazon, from 4.4 two years ago to now 4.1. Goodreads inched down from 3.85 to 3.81, with a combined total of 633 ratings. I wrote the book quickly (about 200 hours total) and have now made about $17K, or around $86/hr. Not a huge amount, but not bad for something that I initially thought only 50-100 people would read.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been two years since The Motivation Hacker came out, so here's another updated graph of ebook sales by platform including the second year. (See also First Year Book Sales, Aftermath: The Motivation Hacker, and Fourth Year Book Sales)

Sales again have fallen off more slowly than I expected, although it's finally getting quiet now, down to about two sales a day in March. In total, it's up to 4102 copies, or around 60x how many I was expecting. Cool!

Total reviews climbed from 124 to 275, and sentiment ebbed from 4.5 stars on Amazon to 4.4, and from 3.90 to 3.85 on Goodreads.

At $2.99, I've kept the book as cheap as possible while still in Amazon's 70% royalty split bucket, and I did similarly with the new CreateSpace paperback ($7.99). The total royalties are around $9065.42, bringing my effective hourly rate up to $43.31.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

But instead of writing those, I'm just working really hard (alongside Scott, George, Matt, Michael, our artists and designers, and our open source contributors) on CodeCombat, which is getting really good as we get close to December's Hour of Code and the completion of our new beginner learn-to-code offering and iPad app. This is fun, but it doesn't leave much time for cool, effortful blog posts. So here's a quick one saying what's up, since a friend mentioned that it is hard to tell what I'm doing when I don't say what I'm doing.

Besides hacking, Chloe and I (and CodeCombat) moved into a sweet new apartment/office which is actually big enough for both purposes instead of too small for either. It's still in San Francisco, in SoMa, right next to the ball park. It was surreal and amusing to watch the riots going on outside our window when the local baseball team won the global baseball tournament.

Skritter is continuing to do well in the hands of its team, whereas George, Scott, and I are happily obsolete. The guys released an Android app last month.

I'm eating a lot of MealSquares, and they are still great, saving me a ton of time. Try a box.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Emacs wizards will tell you that it is not merely a text editor, but an operating system; not just a way to work, but a way of life; not only a thing they use, but a thing they are. After having used Emacs for nearly ten years now, I see that it's all true.

More often than not, when someone asks me how I do something, like generating percentile feedback work graphs, making epic time-lapse videos, and figuring out what's important in life (see the Experiential Sampling section)–I have to say something like, "Well, it's pretty straightforward, I just have an Emacs post-save hook in my org-mode buffer that runs a Python script to parse my Emacs timestamps and POST the JSON to App Engine where it's graphed by Highcharts and also sends an NSDistributedNotification so that my Telepath heads-up display can update its embedded UIView pulling the same graph from my website. The only thing missing is authenticating to the Beeminder API, heh heh! Come to think of it–"

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Someone posted this on Facebook, having captured me on my urban walk to work. Amidst discussion of how someone could have possibly married me and how I can be inside a restaurant with no shoes and which other crazy people don't wear shoes and the inexorable hippie onslaught and just what is that on my back, Chloe (who, as it turns out, is friends with said someone) notices:

Then there was a flurry of posts saying how this thread is what Facebook is made for and how something great/terrible has happened for social media this day. I was amused. I feel like I've really connected with the OP now, whereas when I saw her in the burrito place, she was just another NPC to me as we each quietly strummed our phones waiting for Mexican food and moments with familiar faces.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

These are the three plants I have out of my 99 things. I went to a plant nursery and bought them after my friend David pointed me to this TED talk: How to Grow Fresh Air in which three plants are recommended for not only producing all the fresh air you need, but also filtering out almost all air pollutants.

They didn't have a money plant, so I bought a rubber plant instead. Technically you're supposed to have a bunch of each of these plants per person. Well, whatever. They have funny names, live indoors with no maintenance and no direct sunlight, are difficult to kill, and might be making the air a little cleaner.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.